The politics of migration, at home and abroad, have radically changed since the project began. Britain voted to leave the EU, the Far Right gained a hold on the German Bundestag, and the United States elected a president who denounces immigrants in terms no president has ever used. The Trump administration muscled through a travel ban aimed at Muslims, separated mothers and children at the border, cut refugee admissions to the lowest level in four decades, assailed protections for immigrants brought to the United States illegally as kids, and erased the words "Nation of Immigrants" from the work of the immigration agency. No one can fault President Trump for hiding his views. He cut a 2018 campaign ad too racially inflammatory for Fox News. Among the labels he's attached to immigrants are "drug dealer," "terrorist," "animal," "gang member," "criminal," "rapist," and "snake."

Little about Rosalie, a four-foot, eleven-inch nurse, evokes the main American controversies. She never crossed a border illegally. She doesn't sport gang tattoos. To the challenges of assimilation, she brings advantages the poor and unauthorized lack. She's the kind of immigrant who is largely invisible in political debate but increasingly common. Since 2008, the United States has attracted more Asians than Latin Americans, and nearly half of the newcomers, like Rosalie, have college degrees. Every corner of America has an immigrant like her.

In a world where migration is a growing norm, it is tempting to call Rosalie's experience an ordinary one, propelled by a common mix of hope and doubt. But nothing about an immigrant's life is truly ordinary. The journey from a Manila slum to a Texas hospital spanned eighty five hundred miles and a quarter century, and little that happened along the way went according to plan. For Rosalie, as for the world, immigration is a story filled with surprise.

Excerpted from A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves by Jason DeParle. Copyright © 2019 by Jason DeParle. Excerpted by permission of Viking. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.